World & survival

• Discovery. Not everything starts visible. search, forage, survey, or look can uncover hidden items and make them legal targets.
• Mobs. Creatures follow their nature: herbivores browse, carnivores hunt. Defeating one usually drops things to collect or craft with.
• Things. Gear adds its power to your rolls once you equip it, and any two carried items can combine through crafting.
• Safe havens. Some locations, including the town every hero starts in, hold no creatures at all, and no hero can attack another hero inside one. The attack is refused before any dice are rolled. Sanctuary has the rule in full.

• Outside a safe haven, a hero can attack another hero. It resolves like any other attack: a roll, then armor, then damage. Inside a safe haven that same swing is refused. Sanctuary has that half of the rule.
• Drawing blood makes you their enemy, without a vote. Any damage at all, down to a single point, puts the attacker on the wounded hero's enemies list, under Relationships on that hero's panel. An area attack does it once for every hero it hurt.
• A fall to another hero is an ordinary fall. The engine never asks who struck the blow, so the price of coming back works exactly as Survival & return describes.

Befriend, vilify, estrange

befriend <hero> marks a hero as a friend; vilify <hero> marks them as an enemy; estrange <hero> removes them from both lists. Each targets another hero in your location, not a creature or yourself. The room votes on each like any other command.

• One list at a time. Vilifying a friend moves them to enemies. Estranging clears either mark and returns them to neutral.
• It is one-directional. Marking a hero a friend does not make you one of theirs, so they can still attack you.
• It changes which roll an action uses. A verb can resolve as a friendly, a neutral or a hostile roll, and which one the engine reaches for depends on how the acting hero has the target marked. A hero they have not marked at all counts as neutral rather than as an enemy, so the same word aimed at a friend, at a stranger and at an enemy is three different rolls.
• It decides who an area attack catches. An area attack rolls to pick its targets first. When that roll lands it catches only heroes the caster has marked an enemy, so a friend standing right beside them is spared, and so is anyone the caster never marked at all. When it misses, that filter is gone and it catches whoever is in reach, friends included, and a hero named in the command is caught either way. Area of effect roll types has the caps and the rest of the sequence.

Each world is guarded by a World Boss; the portal onward stays sealed until it falls. The deepest world is the frontier. Slay its boss, and the hero who lands the killing blow earns a one-time right to meditate world ! <vision> and forge the next world from their imagination. Every conquered frontier opens the next. The chain never ends.

• To return, the voters choose meditate live ! <reason>. The reason must feel sincere within the fiction; it faces the same AI judge you can try in the growth chapter.
• A fall is a setback, not an ending. The reason still has to convince the judge, but the cost takes whatever experience the hero has rather than stranding them.
• A hero you can't find isn't necessarily a dead one. A hero can be out of the world instead: resting rather than gone. A streamer's hero goes dormant between sessions and takes no commands while it is, then comes back to the same spot the moment the channel goes live again. Its story, events and portrait stay readable the whole time. Stream with your chat covers the switch.
• Free To Play heroes are the exception to all of this. A Free To Play hero is a public hero kept in the world on purpose, so it can always afford to come back. See Crowds & Free To Play heroes.